Cyber attacks against independent media: DDoS
DDoS attacks have recently become the most powerful cyber weapon of governments to censor investigative journalists and take their websites offline.
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server or network by overwhelming the target with a flood of Internet traffic. Arms Watch, my investigative journalism platform, which documents war crimes, has constantly been the target of such cyber attacks. I have been using DDoS protection ever since my website was created. However, the last malicious attack has been so massive that it has taken my website down, with more than 53 million requests flooding my Internet traffic from different locations around the world, 17.7 million of which originating from the US.